#SeriousAcademics

Using social media to impress people that you know – as well as those that you have never met – has now become a professional concern for many academics. I see more and more of them live tweeting and hashtagging their way through events. When did it become acceptable to use your phone throughout a lecture, let alone an entire conference? No matter how good you think you are at multitasking, you will not be truly focusing your attention on the speaker, who has no doubt spent hours preparing for this moment.

Sadly, it appears (to me) that most of the people who share their work online do so purely as proof of their dedication to the profession, to mark them out as more enthusiastic than their peers. This is very sad. Before social networks, academia was essentially a communist utopia, where nobody ever self-aggrandised or showed any hint of ego. This is genuinely true, ask anyone who agrees with me.

I mention all of this, because as a @CollegeMisery follower, I was stunned to see retweets from the compound today on this topic. Who's doing it? Fab, is it you? Didn't Kimmie do it? Did Terry P. do it? Regardless, I hope it continues.

Why, because I'm a serious academic.

Nick

10 comments:

Both Kimmie and Terry P. ran the Twitter page and took more than a few complaints, primarily because it wasn't done the way some of this page's readers thought it should be. I'm going to try it until people tell me they disapprove ... in 5, 4, 3, ... Then I will probably stop as well.

My last attempt at tweeting from a conference (partly for the benefit of colleagues who couldn't make it, but were working on a related project) resulted in my sending several tweets directly to people who were speaking at the conference, rather than making reference to them in tweets meant to go out to a more general audience, because I didn't know the trick of putting a period/dot before the username at the beginning of a tweet. So, #tweetfail.

I've also become less sympathetic to students who put stupid stuff out for everyone to see on social media, since I've noted that my own young relatives seem to be pretty good at being on social media while hiding most of their activity from their parents (and their aunt). They're bright kids, but I don't think it's really that difficult.

It takes extraordinary discipline and concentration to live-tweet an academic presentation well, trying to boil the points down to tweetable length while knowing that the author of the paper will see them and you'd better do justice to their work. Yes, it can be disconcerting to see people typing away in the audience, but that's easily avoided by introducing yourself and asking if it's OK if you live-tweet. In my experience, speakers are usually delighted.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.